


With my sentimental lies

by risinggreatness



Series: Circle 'round the sun [53]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 06:36:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2722394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/risinggreatness/pseuds/risinggreatness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In exile on Tatooine, Ben lives with guilt and ghosts</p>
            </blockquote>





	With my sentimental lies

Ben trudges away from the homestead at dusk. A boy follows him.

He pays for a room in Anchorhead; the boy stands at his elbow.

Ben lies down on the hard cot. His eyelids droop heavily and he falls into a fitful sleep. The boy waits in the corner.

He wakes and the boy’s presence is still in the room, though the streaming ( _burning_ ) sunlight keeps him at bay.

\----------

The ramshackle hovel is situated on the border of the Dune Sea; the homesteader is glad to be rid of it. Ben doesn’t care. He moves in and the boy moves in with him.

“This place is a dump.”

Ben snaps, “Will you leave me alone, Anakin!”

Unexpectedly the pitch of the boy’s voice deepens. He laughs; “Oh come on. I haven’t been pestering you _that_ much.”

Ben comes face-to-face with a grinning Anakin. He stumbles backwards, “This is impossible. You’re – you’re –”

Anakin laughs again, “You can’t honestly think you could beat me that easily.”

The lump in his throat is too large to swallow. This shouldn’t be possible. Ben watched that face darken and burn. The competitive smirk turned into a hardened glower. But down to the scar across his eye, everything is as it was.

With growing courage he reaches out to the familiar face, “How?”

“Exactly how you would think.”

Ben’s outstretched fingers touch only air; they curl back into his palm.

“I’m not actually here,” the specter says. “It figures it wouldn’t be more than a day before the suns went to your head.”

Squinting his eyes, Ben sees Anakin is nothing more than a haze in the low light – a ghost of his own making. Still he asks, “Why are you here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Ben gives no answer.

And Anakin responds with the delight of a youngling, “I’m here to torment you.”

At the words, Anakin’s ghost begins to transform. His face smolders and his legs and arm crumble away; it collapses to the floor, cursing. The sound echoes in Ben’s head. Its anguish becomes his.

Eyes clenched shut; he cowers away from the specter.

Screams morph into laughter.

The teenage Anakin grins fiendishly from ear-to-ear.

“I told you you would hate it here.”

In an instant, the ghost vanishes.

\----------

Their calls are mostly silent. Neither expects anything else from the other.

The only thing she wants to hear from him is news of her son – her Luke. And he is only interested in Leia in as far as any Force-sensitivity she exhibits.

Padmé waits for Ben to talk about his latest visit to the Lars homestead ( _he never speaks directly of Luke_ ).

“The farm is well-kept. The harvest doesn’t bring in many credits, but they get by.”

Her son is not as fortunate as her daughter in adoptive family. They do not lack in love and care, but in wealth. Leia wants for nothing with the Organas: unexpected gifts, clothes for all occasions, doctors when she’s ill ( _as she has been recently_ ), and she will have the finest education in the galaxy.

She takes Ben’s comments to mean there are things Luke will want for, but he is well looked after.

Padmé wishes desperately she was the one providing for them. She imagines the three of them living together, crammed in her tiny apartment. She imagines them playing, learning, and growing side-by-side. ( _She doesn’t spare any thoughts imaging they have a father and she has a husband._ ) She imagines how much she would be able to see them, but even in her head it doesn’t seem like all that much.

Bitterly she thinks Ben is right: _it is better they have others looking out for them._

His voice wakes her from the daydream, “The boy is healthy.” Then after some hesitancy, he knows she doesn’t care to hear it where her children are concerned, “The Force created a strong bond between him and his sister.”

There must be some trace of curiosity in her face because he explains, “Ever since she fell ill he’s been upset, like he senses a disturbance in the Force.”

Padmé bites her lip. Systems apart and they are still connected to each other; looking out for one another, just as she told them to.

“Padmé, I have to ask. Has the girl –”

“No,” she replies shortly.

Her children are not a means to an end as Ben sees them. Padmé knows what end it is.

\----------

The holo switches off, but Ben’s conscious is not done with him for the day.

“Are you going to abandon them too?”

Ahsoka’s arms are folded defensively across her chest.

She is not like the other ghosts of the Order; she is not the Force taking her shape. She is more like Anakin or Satine, his imagination using her image to haunt him.

He blames himself for that too. ( _Cut down before her training was complete._ ) He should have kept looking instead of settling here to wait for the son to take up his father’s lightsaber. He should have kept searching even if all it yielded was her broken body.

“I never meant to.”

“But you let Yoda talk you into it, and then you talked yourself into believing it was the right thing to do. Just like you’ve convinced yourself killing Anakin is the right thing to do.”

“He’s not Anakin anymore.”

“Darth Vader – Anakin. Anakin – Darth Vader. What’s the difference? In the end you have to make a decision and see it through, like the duchess.”

“Don’t…”

“Don’t what? Invoke her name? You let her down too, you know.”

He’s had about as much berating as her can take, “What would you have had me do?! Finish the job on Mustafar?! Throw myself in after for –”

He doesn’t complete the thought, but she knows what he’s thinking.

“He wasn’t really your brother.”

“And you weren’t really my sister, but I loved you all the same.”

Try as he did, to live by the Jedi Code, he couldn’t stop himself from growing fond of Ahsoka, of Anakin, of Padmé, of Satine, and of Qui-Gon before any of them.

He feels drained; he feels tired and old.

“I loved you no less than I loved him.” He admits it to her image, but it’s only the empty air that hears.

Without sympathy, “Then why did you abandon me?”

Neither the dead nor his conscious can offer him the answer.

\----------

As a hub of criminal activity, Mos Eisley is not a particularly lively location. It simmers in the heat of Tatoos I and II. Smugglers, pirates, slavers, and bounty hunters alike come for work – come to lay low, but also to take a few days planetside. It’s how news ( _truth and rumor_ ) get to the backwater ( _ha_ ) system.

Today is different. The spaceport is abuzz with new commotion. The first thing ever to happen to this desert waste has set a fire among the criminal set. For once the loudest thing at the cantina bar isn’t the lousy band or a squabble over the bill.

A devaronian gestures emphatically, “I’m telling you, it was a star destroyer! Nearly dropped my cargo and jumped back to hyperspace when I saw it!”

“There’s no way the Empire’s cracking down on the Hutts now – not after twenty years,” adds a ranat.

“Didn’t look like they had much interest in Tatooine. Too busy going after a little consular ship.”

Somebody else pipes up, “I heard it was the _Executioner_ chasing after ‘em.”

“That’s ridiculous. Vader doesn’t deal with politicians personally.”

“Not unless it’s those rebels we’ve been catching wind of.”

Nobody says it, but they’re all thinking it: better a bunch of rebellion-types than them.

A stool scrapes loudly and a dusty old man stands to leave. The bar quiets as he makes his unintentionally dramatic exit.

Once he’s pulled a hood over his white hair the conversation resumes, “I don’t care why they’re here. If one stormtrooper so much as steps foot on the sand, I’m out of here.”

There is a murmur of agreement; too much risk involved, even if they are only after some members of a crackpot cause.

Chewie roars they ought to think about doing the same, with or without a job.

“Do you think Jabba’s more or less likely to put a price on my head with Imperials around?”

The wookiee shoots him an exasperated look.

Han decides he’ll try his luck.

\--------

Padmé hovers over Ben as he rummages through a chest of possessions.

She is cross with him ( _when isn’t she?_ ), but Ben almost prefers the blame to the marked indifference of their conversations when she was alive. At least her ghost speaks to him.

“Are you going to tell him the truth?”

Ben doesn’t respond; she won’t like the answer. The boy will learn the half-truth, the one Ben has been telling himself for years.

The chest creaks as it shuts.

He handles three lightsabers with care. All of them suffer from disuse; they rarely receive the attention they require.

His is beaten and worn; the grip is formed to the shape of his palm. It is foreign in his hand ( _but then again, it’s not really his, is it?_ ). He buckles it to his belt. Next to his, Ahsoka’s looks brand new, save for some spots of tarnish and dust. He wipes it down before returning it to the chest.

Ben turns his attention to the remaining blade, the one he is to pass down to Luke.

A wave of memory washes over him ( _helping construct the lightsaber to the wretched duel when it was turned against him_ ).

Padmé watches closely as he tends to it.

“When I entrusted Anakin’s lightsaber to you, _this_ was not my intended purpose.”

“Well, things don’t always work out the way we want them to, do they?”

His complacency enrages her, “If that’s how you feel about it, you should stay here and lick your wounds instead of making Luke and Leia do it for you! Leave them out of your plots and your lies.”

“As I recall, you were the first one calling for his demise.”

“Not readily and not when it involved my children killing him!”

Ben puts the lightsaber back at the top of the chest beside Ahsoka’s. There’s no going back to fix what he destroyed. This is his role now: tell the hero what they need to know and send them on their journey.

Vader must die and, since he cannot do it, it must be the boy or the girl.

Spitefully, Padmé spits, “You didn’t even try to find another way.”

“I’ve been through this a hundred times. There is no other way.”

Ben leaves the house and, for the first time, it is Ben who cuts the discussion short.

It is not yet dawn, but it will take him most of the day to walk to the Lars homestead. Owen and Beru can protest all they want; Luke must learn about the Force and, with the Empire directly above them, it has to be now.

**Author's Note:**

> See author bio for discussion on this 'verse.


End file.
